I like it. There is something subtle here that marks Nadella as a pretty good senior manager (assuming the paraphrase is accurate). He explained what the job is and how to do it in a simple and concise way.
Now you'd think that would just be normal practice but I have witnessed a disturbing number of leaders who either never got this talk or lack the empathy to realise that you have to explain to people what they should be doing. I will single out "leaders" who demand people get vague (or even specific) results and they have to figure it out. That is the extent of the leader's communication. All too common a practice, that can work with the right people but it is bad management.
Nadella isn't doing that here. He is still asking for vague (or specific) results, but he is including a "with these tools and by doing these things" part that is quite important and makes the whole talk actionable.
> Once we were seated, he delivered the most concise, precise, and actionable lesson in leadership imaginable—a lesson I believe everyone could benefit from. As I recall, he said:
> > Congratulations …. your days of whining are over .
> > In this room, we deliver success, we don’t whine.
> > Look, I’m not confused, I know you walk through fields of shit every day.
> > Your job is to find the rose petals.
> > Don’t come whining that you don’t have the resources you need.
> > We’ve done our homework.
> > We’ve evaluated the portfolio, considered the opportunities and allocated our available resources to those opportunities.
> > That is what you have to work with.
> > Your job is to manufacture success with the resources you’ve been allocated.
> > And yes – you have a hard job.
Not concise: he could've said "Your job is to manufacture success with the resources you’ve been allocated. No ifs, ands, or buts."
Precise: what does he mean by "success"? Maximizing profit?
Actionable: yes. The rest of the lesson is "you control how resources are allocated within your team, and of course also the attitude and instructions you present to them. Set a goal for 'outsized' success (e.g. increase growth), have a plausible plan to that goal, follow the plan, and if the plan becomes no longer plausible have a new one. If you do that, you can occasionally fail and not be kicked out."
> Satya was not giving us a pep talk, he was giving us an architecture for success.
Maybe it was also an "architecture for success" but it was a pep talk. Also, this entire post sounds like typical AI, and like typical AI has lots of filler and vapidity. It would really benefit by having concrete examples of great leadership.
A teacher of mine once said that Shakespeare's greatest virtue was his economy of language. The maximization of meaning with the minimum of words. I thought this was ridiculous. How could such flowery prose be considered economical? Certainly the plot of his stories could be described more efficiently.
I find the word "success" a bit jarring. It sounds like "stock price" and not "great products", which is how I think about Microsoft and why Apple has gone past Microsoft (and why Apple is struggling now, having lost that focus on the product in at least software design).
Is this a parody? It seems obviously made-up but the other comments seem to be taking it at face value?
> Re-read it again and again until you get it.
OK, now I get it.
"This is my room. This isn't your room. I'm the most important person here. You should be honoured to be standing in the same room as me. But you're not here to help make decisions. I already made the decisions. Good luck"
Right? "Go find outsized success, but I'm going to put a non negotiable cap on the size. You can pick a bad direction for good reasons, but only you will be responsible if there are no good directions."
To be more clear: Failure can happen due to both internal and external forces. This advice enshrines internal power structures and ensures their systemic faults are permanent. It's not a seat at the table if you don't have a say.
Microsoft's revenue was $281.7 billion for the last year, up 15% on the previous year. Revenue from Azure was > $75 billion. Doesn't seem like a failing company to me.
Azure is a failure once you factor in the concentration risk of their customer portfolio. Most of the revenue comes from maybe 10 companies. OpenAI alone is ~50% of future commitments.
Surely Azure is failing too, it's easily the worst cloud option. We have a few clients who run APIs on Azure and for all of them I've had to write special systems to monitor and handle the API falling over.
I like it. There is something subtle here that marks Nadella as a pretty good senior manager (assuming the paraphrase is accurate). He explained what the job is and how to do it in a simple and concise way.
Now you'd think that would just be normal practice but I have witnessed a disturbing number of leaders who either never got this talk or lack the empathy to realise that you have to explain to people what they should be doing. I will single out "leaders" who demand people get vague (or even specific) results and they have to figure it out. That is the extent of the leader's communication. All too common a practice, that can work with the right people but it is bad management.
Nadella isn't doing that here. He is still asking for vague (or specific) results, but he is including a "with these tools and by doing these things" part that is quite important and makes the whole talk actionable.
I was expecting sudden clarity on the contrast between this team of elite succeeders and the general perception of Microsoft products today.
Nope, this is the Super Bowl, period. I guess at those levels real life does not matter anymore, just _success_.
> Once we were seated, he delivered the most concise, precise, and actionable lesson in leadership imaginable—a lesson I believe everyone could benefit from. As I recall, he said:
> > Congratulations …. your days of whining are over .
> > In this room, we deliver success, we don’t whine.
> > Look, I’m not confused, I know you walk through fields of shit every day.
> > Your job is to find the rose petals.
> > Don’t come whining that you don’t have the resources you need.
> > We’ve done our homework.
> > We’ve evaluated the portfolio, considered the opportunities and allocated our available resources to those opportunities.
> > That is what you have to work with.
> > Your job is to manufacture success with the resources you’ve been allocated.
> > And yes – you have a hard job.
Not concise: he could've said "Your job is to manufacture success with the resources you’ve been allocated. No ifs, ands, or buts."
Precise: what does he mean by "success"? Maximizing profit?
Actionable: yes. The rest of the lesson is "you control how resources are allocated within your team, and of course also the attitude and instructions you present to them. Set a goal for 'outsized' success (e.g. increase growth), have a plausible plan to that goal, follow the plan, and if the plan becomes no longer plausible have a new one. If you do that, you can occasionally fail and not be kicked out."
> Satya was not giving us a pep talk, he was giving us an architecture for success.
Maybe it was also an "architecture for success" but it was a pep talk. Also, this entire post sounds like typical AI, and like typical AI has lots of filler and vapidity. It would really benefit by having concrete examples of great leadership.
A teacher of mine once said that Shakespeare's greatest virtue was his economy of language. The maximization of meaning with the minimum of words. I thought this was ridiculous. How could such flowery prose be considered economical? Certainly the plot of his stories could be described more efficiently.
What a moron.
how dare you blame it on the AI when there is such a clear "infographic infgraphy" at the bottom?
I find the word "success" a bit jarring. It sounds like "stock price" and not "great products", which is how I think about Microsoft and why Apple has gone past Microsoft (and why Apple is struggling now, having lost that focus on the product in at least software design).
Oh, hi Mark
This was my first thought. Was very confused when I saw Satya mentioned.
Honestly thought this was some sort of satire on corporate ass-kissing at first.
So empty and full of nothing.
Is this a parody? It seems obviously made-up but the other comments seem to be taking it at face value?
> Re-read it again and again until you get it.
OK, now I get it.
"This is my room. This isn't your room. I'm the most important person here. You should be honoured to be standing in the same room as me. But you're not here to help make decisions. I already made the decisions. Good luck"
Right? "Go find outsized success, but I'm going to put a non negotiable cap on the size. You can pick a bad direction for good reasons, but only you will be responsible if there are no good directions."
To be more clear: Failure can happen due to both internal and external forces. This advice enshrines internal power structures and ensures their systemic faults are permanent. It's not a seat at the table if you don't have a say.
To be fair although he did say he was seated, he wasn't clear as to whether the seat was at a table or not.
What’s with that awful AI-generated infographic at the end? The piece would be better without it…
Agreed. I liked the post. Then that graphic cost the author a whole lot of credibility points.
“Infgraphy”
Would not be surprised if the whole post is ai-generated. I mean it is Microslop after all.
Jeffrey Snover is a person not a company, his blog is private not corporate, and he works for Google.
Stop posting human slop
Ha, more cult of personality, down to idolizing every word from a simple casual speech.
Yeah, this stuff really makes me want to vomit.
I mean, it's a very nice speech but why is Microsoft failing everywhere except Azure? Doesn't seem like outstanding results to me.
Microsoft's revenue was $281.7 billion for the last year, up 15% on the previous year. Revenue from Azure was > $75 billion. Doesn't seem like a failing company to me.
https://www.microsoft.com/investor/reports/ar25/index.html
> failing everywhere except Azure
Azure is a failure once you factor in the concentration risk of their customer portfolio. Most of the revenue comes from maybe 10 companies. OpenAI alone is ~50% of future commitments.
Surely Azure is failing too, it's easily the worst cloud option. We have a few clients who run APIs on Azure and for all of them I've had to write special systems to monitor and handle the API falling over.
> it's easily the worst cloud option.
are you including Oracle in that?
I stand corrected. I'd forgotten they even have one!
Agreed, but for some reason they get a lot of enterprise clients and make millions of them.